The Genius

“That,” Lance said, “or prison.”

We all looked at the food journal for a moment.

Lance said, “Whack.”

From across the room, Marilyn waved at me. I excused myself and went over to talk to Hollister. His handshake was not at all the masculine vise clamp you’d expect, but dry and wary. I noticed also that he had a manicure.

“We were just admiring this piece,” Marilyn said.

“Good choice,” I said.

“Am I right in thinking this is the center of the piece? Ethan?”

I nodded. “Panel number one.”

“How bizarre,” Marilyn said. “What are those? Babies?” “They look like cherubs,” said Hollister.

“Funny you say that,” I said. “That’s how we refer to them. ‘Victor’s Cherubs.’ “

At the center of panel one was a five-pointed star, its dull brown an uncharacteristically muted note in an otherwise lurid palette. Around it danced a ring of winged children, their beatific faces in stark contrast to the rest of the map, which teemed with agitation and bloodshed. Victor had been a very capable draftsman, but evidently these figures had been important enough to him that he wanted to take no chances: they had been rendered with a precision that suggested tracing rather than freehand.

Marilyn said, “They look—oh, I don’t know. Like Botticelli meets Sally Mann. Sort ofpedophilic, don’t you think?”

I raised an eyebrow at her.

Hollister leaned in and squinted. “It’s in remarkably good condition, all things considered.”

“Yes.”

“Did you see the place when it was like that?” he asked, gesturing to a wall where I had hung enlarged photos of the apartment before disassembly.

“I discovered it,” I said. Behind him, I saw Marilyn smile.

“Kevin would like to learn more about the artist.”

“I honestly don’t know how much more I can tell you,” I said.

“How would you compare him to other outsider artists?” Hollister said.

“Well,” I said, shooting a quick evil eye at Marilyn, “I’m not sure that I’d call him an outsider artist.”

Hollister blanched, and I quickly added, “Per se. I’m not sure, per se, that he’s comparable to any other artist—although you might be right, then, in calling him an outsider artist, because part of what defines outsider art is its lack of reference.”

Behind him, Marilyn rubbed her thumb and index finger together.

I spooled out a lot of textbook stuff on Jean Dubuffet, Art Brut, the anticultural movement. “Usually we’re referring to work created by prisoners, children, and the insane, and I’m not sure that Cracke was any of those, per se.”

“I think he was all three,” said Marilyn.

“He was a child?” asked Hollister. “I thought he was old.”

“Well, no,” I said. “I mean—yes. No, he wasn’t a child.”

“How old was he?”

“We don’t know, precisely.”

“I don’t mean literallysaid Marilyn. “I mean look at his concept of the world. It’s so juvenile. Dancing angels? Come on. Who does that? You can’t do that sort of thing with a straight face, you just can’t, and I think it’s terribly sweet that he did.”

“Cloying,” said Hollister.

“It might be, except the bulk of it’s not like that at all—just the opposite, it’s so awful and gory. That’s what makes the piece interesting to me, the extremity of the two emotions at work. I think—you can tell me if I’m wrong, Ethan—but it looks to me like there are two Victor Crackes: the one who draws puppies and cupcakes and fairy rings, and the one”—she pointed to a canvas filled with graphic battle scenes—”who draws decapitations and torture and so on.” She smiled at me. “What do you think.”

I shrugged. “He was trying to encompass everything he saw. He saw kindness and he saw cruelty. It’s not two Victor Crackes: it’s the fault of the world, for being inconsistent.”

Marilyn gestured around the room. “You can’t deny that the work has a crazed quality to it. The obsession with filling in every square inch of the page … Only a madman would draw for forty years and stick it all in a box.”

I admitted that my first thought had been as such.

“See, there you go. That’s part of its appeal, of course.”

“All I know is it’s good.”

“Well, fine, but wouldn’t you feel a little less inclined to show it if you knew it was an SVA student’s senior thesis?”

“An SVA student couldn’t produce anything this honest,” I said. “That’s exactly the point.”

“Now you’re sounding like Dubuffet.”

“Fine. I think it’s refreshing not to have to think four levels of irony deep.”

“Let’s imagine, for a second, that he was a criminal—”

“Hang on,” I said.

“I’m just saying. As a thought experiment.”

“There’s nothing to suggest that. He was a loner. He never bothered anybody.”

“Isn’t that what they say about serial killers?” she said. ” ‘Wouldn’t hurt a fly.’ “

I rolled my eyes.

“Regardless,” she said, “the term outsider artist seems right to me.”

I didn’t really believe that Victor Cracke could be so easily and neatly packaged. But I inferred from Marilyn’s expression that she was trying to do me a favor by giving Hollister something concrete to cling to. He was, I gathered, a labels-and-categories kind of guy.

“We can call him that,” I said. I smiled at Hollister. “For argument’s sake.”

He squinted at the canvas again. “What does it mean.”

“What do you think it means?”

He spent a few moments pursing and unpursing his lips. “Nothing, inherently.”

We decided to leave it at that.

All evening long I kept an eye out for Tony Wexler. I had sent him an invitation—pointedly addressed to his home rather than to the office. I knew he couldn’t come. He never did. He couldn’t come if my father had been snubbed, and I invariably snubbed my father, which mooted the whole point of sending Tony an invitation.

Given his interest in the artist, and his contribution to the discovery of the work, I had figured that I’d at least get a phone call. But I’d heard nothing. It rankled a tiny bit. Even the goddamn superintendent, Shaughnessy,

showed up, stuffed into a heavy sport jacket that had not recently seen the light of day. At first I thought he was some artist dressed deliberately down, a crude parody of a lower-middle-class wardrobe. Then he waved at me from afar and my memory clicked into place: the smudged glasses, the thick wrists. For the life of me I couldn’t figure out why he’d come—or how he had even known about the show. I mentioned this to Nat and he told me that—per my request—we’d sent postcards to everyone I’d interviewed as a way of thanking them.

I was bewildered. “I said to do that?”

Nat smiled. “Senile already.”

“I’ve been living in a bubble,” I said. “Anyhow I doubt I expected anyone to take the invitation seriously.”

“He did.”

“Indeed.” I felt bad for Shaughnessy, who spent the evening walking around and around the drawings, awkwardly trying to pick up the tails of other conversations. Finally, I went over to shake his hand.

He waved at the canvases. “Something else, huh? Was I right?”

“You were.”

“I know it when I see it.”

“You certainly do.”

“I like this one.” He showed me where Victor had drawn a bridge— Ruby thought it looked like the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge—turning into a dragon whose tongue forked and grew into the air trails of a jet, which flew into an ocean, which itself became the open mouth of a giant fish … and so forth. The pictures tended to nest inside one another, so that every time you had found the largest unit, you discovered, upon the addition of more panels, a more impressive superstructure.

“Wild stuff,” said Shaughnessy.

I nodded.

“So’d you sell any yet?”

“Not yet.”